source of his claim to the Anatrurian throne, and if he was related to the other kings and princelings. Most of them are descended one way or another from Queen Victoria, and are almost as much fun at parties as she was.
What about Vlados’s consort, she of the high-piled hair and the pathetic little foxes? The Scott people hadn’t provided a picture of her, but they were nice enough to tell me her name. According to the descriptive listing, she appeared twice in the series—alone on the 35-tschirin stamp, and with her husband on the 50-tschirin denomination. And her name was Queen Liliana.
Scott’s hadn’t priced the Anatrurian issues, noting at once that they were very rare and of dubious philatelic legitimacy; they had been printed to carry not the mail but a message, and, while postally used copies did in fact exist, these seemed to represent contrived cancellations affixed by postmasters sympathetic to the cause of Anatrurian independence.
So Scott knew they were valuable, but didn’t want to go on record with a price. There weren’t many specimens up for grabs, and then again there weren’t all that many hands out there grabbing. If the stamp collection I knocked over happened to contain a set of these gummed portraits of good King Vladdy, I could figure out how to unload them. It would take a little research—specialized catalogs, auction records, some library time spent closeted with back issues of Linn’s. I might not net as high a percentage of retail value as I would with more popular material, but I wouldn’t have any real trouble getting a decent price.
But that wasn’t my problem, because I didn’t have the stamps. I had an Anatrurian girlfriend, but Anatruria was out of business as a stamp-issuing enterprise half a century before she was born, and she might not even know her country had a postal history.
Might that not be something for us to talk about? I could lift the photo from its hallowed place on her footlocker and say, “Ah, King Vlados, and his lovely Queen Liliana! I’d recognize them anywhere.” Would that impress her? Would she be dazzled by my familiarity with her nation’s history, touched by my interest in her heritage?
Maybe. Or maybe she’d just raise her eyebrows the slightest bit and give me that look of skeptical amusement.
I reached for the phone and dialed her number again, with no more success than the other times I’d tried.
Then the little guy came in and stuck a gun in my face.
CHAPTER
Nine
When I first saw him on his way through the door I thought he was a kid wearing his father’s clothes. He couldn’t have been more than five-three, and judging by the way he walked he already had lifts in his shoes. He had a very narrow face, as if it had gotten in the way when Mother Nature clapped her hands. His nose was long and narrow, his lips thin. His hair and eyebrows were black and his skin was very pale, almost translucent. There were patches of color on his cheeks, but they were more suggestive of consumption than radiant good health.
He was wearing a lime-green sport shirt with flowing collar points and he’d buttoned it all the way up to the neck. His pants were of high-gloss blue gabardine, and his shoes were wing-tip slip-ons of woven brown leather. He was wearing a hat, too, a straw panama with a feather in its band, and I think it must have been the hat that made him look like an overdressed child. It was the crowning touch, all right.
“Name your price,” he said.
I didn’t hesitate. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I’m afraid it’s not for sale.”
The first thing I thought—the only thing I thought—was that he was looking to buy my store. I didn’t delude myself that he’d made a study of Barnegat Books and concluded that it was a gold mine. On the contrary, I figured he saw it as the commercial real estate equivalent of a teardown; he’d buy me out so that he could take over my lease, sell my whole stock en bloc to Argosy or the Strand, and establish in Barnegat’s stead a Thai restaurant or a Korean nail shop, something that would be a great cultural asset to the neighborhood. I get offers like that all the time, strange as it may seem, and I don’t bother explaining that I own the building, and that consequently I’m the landlord as well as the tenant. For